10 Percent Of Children and Poor Suffer From Food-borne Disease: WHO
Foodborne illness is the illness resulting from the food spoilage of contaminated food, pathogenic bacteria, viruses, or parasites that contaminate food, as well as chemical or natural toxins such as poisonous mushrooms which also causes death. According to World Health Organization, one out of every 10 people worldwide suffer from foodborne diseases annually, and children and the poor suffer the most from this.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) created the Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group in 2007 to study global variation in the impact of foodborne disease and the result of the research were made in the month of December 2015.
The task force leader Arie Havelaar from the University of Florida said that “The groups most adversely affected by the foodborne diseases are children and people in low-income regions of the world.”
The research group found that these 31 foodborne hazards caused 600 million foodborne illnesses and 420,000 deaths in 2010. The results of the study indicate that up to 33 million healthy life years are lost each year due to foodborne diseases each year. The top three infectious diseases are HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis and air pollution.
Diarrheal disease agents were the most frequent causes of foodborne illness particularly norovirus and Campylobacter.
Non-typhoidal Salmonella enterica, also a diarrheal disease agent, is capable of causing blood poisoning in people with weakened immune systems and was a major cause of death among the pathogens chosen for the study.
Other major pathogens causing foodborne disease deaths included Salmonella Typhi, a subspecies of Salmonella enterica and Taenia solium, a tapeworm that comes from pork products; and the hepatitis A virus.
